Eighty-seven million adults are inadequately insured

Health Insurance Coverage Eight Years After the ACA

The greatest deterioration in the quality and comprehensiveness of coverage has occurred among people in employer plans. More than half of Americans under age 65 — about 158 million people — get their health insurance through an employer, while about one-quarter either have a plan purchased through the individual insurance market or are enrolled in Medicaid. Although the ACA has expanded and improved coverage options for people without access to a job-based health plan, the law largely left the employer market alone.

Since the ACA, Fewer Adults Are Uninsured, but More Are Underinsured

Compared to 2010, when the ACA became law, fewer people today are uninsured, but more people are underinsured. Of the 194 million U.S. adults ages 19 to 64 in 2018, an estimated 87 million, or 45 percent, were inadequately insured.

There also has been some improvement in long-term uninsured rates. Among adults who were uninsured at the time of the survey, 54 percent reported they had been without coverage for more than two years, down from 72 percent before the ACA coverage expansions went into effect.

More Adults Are Underinsured, with the Greatest Growth Occurring Among Those with Employer Coverage

Of people who were insured continuously throughout 2018, an estimated 44 million were underinsured because of high out-of-pocket costs and deductibles. This is up from an estimated 29 million in 2010. The most likely to be underinsured are people who buy plans on their own through the individual market including the marketplaces. However, the greatest growth in the number of underinsured adults is occurring among those in employer health plans.

Fewer Adults Report Not Getting Needed Care Because of Costs, but Gains Have Stalled in Recent Years

In 2014, the year the ACA’s major coverage expansions went into effect, the share of adults in our survey who said that cost prevented them from getting health care that they needed, such as prescription medication, dropped significantly. But there has been no significant improvement since then.

The lack of continued improvement in overall access to care nationally reflects the fact that coverage gains have plateaued, and underinsured rates have climbed. People who experience any time uninsured are more likely than any other group to delay getting care because of cost. And among people with coverage all year, those who were underinsured reported cost-related delays in getting care at nearly double the rate of those who were not underinsured.

Fewer Adults Have Difficulty Paying Their Medical Bills, but the Improvement Has Stalled

There was modest but significant improvement following the ACA’s coverage expansions in the proportion of all U.S. adults who reported having difficulty paying their medical bills or said they were paying off medical debt over time. However, those gains have stalled.

Inadequate Coverage Is Associated with More Problems Paying Medical Bills

Inadequate insurance coverage leaves people exposed to high health care costs, and these expenses can quickly turn into medical debt. More than half of uninsured adults and insured adults who have had a coverage gap reported that they had had problems paying medical bills or were paying off medical debt over time. Among people who had continuous insurance coverage, the rate of medical bill and debt problems is nearly twice as high for the underinsured as it is for people who are not underinsured.

From the Conclusion

U.S. working-age adults are significantly more likely to have health insurance since the ACA became law in 2010. But the improvement in uninsured rates has stalled. In addition, more people have health plans that fail to adequately protect them from health care costs, with the fastest deterioration in cost protection occurring in the employer market. The ACA made only minor changes to employer plans, and the erosion in cost protection has taken a bite out of the progress made in Americans’ health coverage since the law’s enactment.

Health care costs are primarily what’s driving growth in premiums across all health insurance markets. Employers and insurers have kept premiums down by increasing consumers’ deductibles and other cost-sharing, which in turn is making more people underinsured.

WHY ARE INSURED AMERICANS SPENDING SO MUCH OF THEIR INCOME ON HEALTH CARE COSTS?

Several factors may be contributing to high underinsured rates among adults in individual market plans and rising rates in employer plans:

1. Although the Affordable Care Act’s reforms to the individual market have provided consumers with greater protection against health care costs, many moderate-income Americans have not seen gains. The ACA’s essential health benefits package, cost-sharing reductions for lower- income families, and out-of-pocket cost limits have helped make health care more affordable for millions of Americans. But while the cost-sharing reductions have been particularly important in lowering deductibles and copayments for people with incomes under 250 percent of the poverty level (about $62,000 for a family of four), about half of people who purchase marketplace plans, and all of those buying plans directly from insurance companies, do not have them.

2. The bans against insurers excluding people from coverage because of a preexisting condition and rating based on health status have meant that individuals with greater health needs, and thus higher costs, are now able to get health insurance in the individual market. Not surprisingly, the survey data show that people with individual market coverage are somewhat more likely to have health problems than they were in 2010, which means they also have higher costs.

3. While plans in the employer market historically have provided greater cost protection than plans in the individual market, businesses have tried to hold down premium growth by asking workers to shoulder an increasing share of health costs, particularly in the form of higher deductibles. While the ACA’s employer mandate imposed a minimum coverage requirement on large companies, the requirement amounts to just 60 percent of typical person’s overall costs. This leaves the potential for high plan deductibles and copayments.

4. Growth in Americans’ incomes has not kept pace with growth in health care costs. Even when health costs rise more slowly, they can take an increasingly larger bite out of incomes.

Trump Versus the Socialist Menace

By Paul KrugmanThe New York Times, February 7, 2019

After all, voters overwhelmingly support most of the policies proposed by American “socialists,” including higher taxes on the wealthy and making Medicare available to everyone (although they don’t support plans that would force people to give up private insurance — a warning to Democrats not to make single-payer purity a litmus test).

Comment:

By Don McCanne, M.D.

Many politicians today are walking away from Single Payer Medicare for All – a system that would make health care affordable for everyone. Many suggest instead that we merely need to add one more option to our fragmented system of financing health care. So how is the system that they want to protect working?

Of just the U.S. adults alone – the 194 million aged 19 to 64 in 2018 – an estimated 87 million, or 45 percent, were inadequately insured. The greatest growth in underinsured has been in the insurance market that supposedly we were protecting – the employer-sponsored health plans that are required to cover only 60 percent of the typical person’s overall costs.

This is shocking! The financial protection supposedly afforded by private employer-sponsored plans is deteriorating. Yesterday’s Quote of the Day revealed that the incidence of medical bankruptcy has not declined since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

And yet there is a surge in the call to protect private insurance from being displaced by a single payer Medicare for All system. As only one of hundreds of examples, Paul Krugman writes that people don’t support plans that would force them to give up private insurance – “a warning to Democrats not to make single-payer purity a litmus test.”

When you look at all of the other proposals designed to avoid the enactment of a single payer Medicare for All system, none of them address adequately this deterioration in the financial protection that should be an essential feature of private insurance. Yet if you redesign private plans so they do provide that protection, the premiums would be so high that much greater public subsidies would be required – subsidies that the politicians will tell us we can’t afford.

They don’t get it. Our current fragmented, dysfunctional, administratively wasteful system is by far the most expensive model of financing health care, while taking away choice of doctors and hospitals and forcing on individuals excessive out-of-pocket costs that have resulted in inadequate coverage for 87 million adults. Eighty-seven million!

All of that would go away with the least costly system of providing comprehensive coverage for everyone: Single Payer Medicare for All.

Remember when they tell us that people want their private plans protected from Medicare for All, 87 million adults are potentially exposed to financial hardship, and most of them don’t even realize it since they have not yet faced major medical expenses. But what is insurance for? Prepaid medical care through the social insurance program of Single Payer Medicare for All will show you what it’s for. Eighty-seven million fewer adults that would have to worry about the potential of debt from medical bills.